How It Stacks Up Against Waymo
"Tesla Robotaxi is newer, cheaper to scale, and expanding fast. Waymo has a multi-year head start and a much larger daily ride volume. Both can win."
Waymo is the established benchmark. It was delivering roughly 250,000 weekly rides before Tesla's service even launched, operates in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, and uses a more hardware-intensive lidar/radar/camera stack that costs significantly more per vehicle.
Tesla's advantage is scale potential: Model Ys are already being produced by the hundreds of thousands. If the software continues to mature, Tesla can flood cities with robotaxis faster than any competitor can manufacture purpose-built vehicles. By Q4 2025, Tesla had logged nearly 700,000 paid rides across Austin and the Bay Area combined — still well behind Waymo, but the trajectory is notable for a service less than a year old.
How to Get a Ride
Rides are booked through the Tesla Robotaxi app — a separate app from the main Tesla app. You don't need to own a Tesla. Open it, request a ride like you'd request a regular rideshare, and a driverless Model Y will come to you — assuming you're inside the active service zone.
Pricing hasn't been officially stated for Miami, but Austin's launch pricing was $4.20 per ride as a nod to Tesla's culture. Expect pricing to evolve as the service scales and more competitive pressure builds.
Bottom Line
Miami is a big deal. It's the first market outside Texas, the first Florida launch, and a signal that Tesla's expansion is real and accelerating. Phoenix, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas are next in line. If those four launch on the same kind of cadence, Robotaxi will be in eight cities before the end of the year — and the competition with Waymo gets very interesting very fast.